Rise of the Ronin

I went into Rise of the Ronin carrying the full weight of Nioh expectations, and the first thing it does is quietly set those aside. This is not Nioh with a bigger map. It is something messier, more ambitious in some directions and noticeably softer in others, a game that keeps flashing moments of brilliance before cutting to its tenth fetch-adjacent side mission in a row. The setting earns genuine respect. The Bakumatsu period, Japan's turbulent final years of the Edo era, is rich historical ground and Team Ninja actually commits to it. You play as one of the Blade Twins, half of a paired warrior unit called the Veiled Edge, set loose across recreated versions of Yokohama, Edo, and Kyoto as foreign powers and domestic factions tear the country apart. Historical figures weave through the story, and the world-building has real texture if you're willing to read the codex entries. The narrative itself is uneven, and the English dialogue delivery lands closer to a mid-budget dubbed anime than a prestige RPG, but the bones of an interesting political story are genuinely there. Where the game earns its price outright is combat. The Ki-management system asks you to deplete enemy stamina through well-timed Counterspark deflections, then punish the opening with a critical hit, a loop that rewards patience and reads in a way that Nioh veterans will recognize immediately. The stance system layers on top of that: Jin, Chi, and Ten styles each counter specific weapon classes (Jin shreds lightweight sabre users, Chi punishes heavy odachi fighters, Ten handles standard katana opponents), and you can assign up to three styles per weapon and rank them up through Novice to Master, unlocking Veiled Arts as you go. Reading the room mid-fight, swapping stance on the fly, chaining a Ki-depleting combo into a stance-break finish, it clicks in a way that makes the repetitive open-world structure forgivable for longer than it should be. Weapons range from katanas and spears to rifles and bows, and the transition from pure swordplay to hybrid ranged combat as Western technology enters the setting is one of the more interesting thematic-mechanical integrations in recent memory. The open world is where patience wears thin. The map is cluttered in the familiar way, outpost icons and collectibles stacking up like someone imported an Assassin's Creed design sheet and forgot to edit it down. Bond-building with companions unlocks new combat styles and the occasional story beat, which is a clever mechanical justification, but plenty of the side content is pure padding dressed up with period-accurate costuming. If filler quests are your personal nemesis, carve out a tolerance window before you start. On PC the situation is further complicated. The port launched with serious optimisation issues, and even mid-to-high-end hardware struggled at Ultra settings with disproportionate VRAM demands. A day-one patch landed without meaningfully addressing the frame-rate instability, and reviewers testing on RTX 3060 through RTX 4070 hardware all hit similar walls. The advice from across the community at launch was blunt: drop to standard or low settings regardless of your specs. Patches may have improved things by the time you read this, so check the current state before adjusting your expectations, but go in knowing this is a port that required patience. The Metacritic score of 73 is accurate as a mid-point. Rise of the Ronin is not a game that will reshape the genre or demand the same re-read value as the titles that live rent-free in my head. What it is, at its best, is a thoroughly engaging combat sandbox set against one of history's most cinematically underused periods, wrapped in open-world padding that Team Ninja has not yet learned to trim.

Monika · Scout Team

RPGs

Be the first to comment on Rise of the Ronin.